Read The Birth of Korean Cool for Free Online Page B

years. I love working with kids. But I hate dealing with the Korean parents because they’re shady.”
    Kim wasn’t surprised by the SAT scandal at all. He said, “It’s very simple economics.
Hakwons
make a ton of money [from selling answers], so ethics go by the
wayside.
    “I’d like to think I was one of the ones who tried to do it the right way,” he added, “based on pedagogy and education, based on what’s good for the student.
I’ve pushed my way of doing things on the parents, but it’s very difficult to convince them.”
    Kim believes the reason for Koreans’ obsession with exam performance is based on Korea’s ancient tradition of civil service exams. Today’s Korean university exams have a much
higher pass rate than the
kwako
exams of yore, but the stakes and stress level are still very high. Said Kim, “It’s hard to change a mentality that has been going on for
thousands of years.”
    University entrance anxiety is regarded as one of the reasons that Korea has the highest suicide rate of any nation in the industrialized world. In fact, the most common cause of death for
Koreans under the age of forty is suicide; for most other OECD nations, the leading cause is auto accidents or heart attack. Hanging is the most popular method, constituting 44.9 percent of all
suicides; poison comes in at a close second. 6
    I would have guessed that jumping off buildings was the most popular method. At least, that’s how we used to imagine our suicides when I was a student. We all thought about it. We all
talked about it. One of my best childhood friends confessed to me, decades later, that she once stood atop her building and seriously contemplated jumping. Happily, she didn’t go through with
it.
    When this suicide phenomenon comes up in conversation, people invariably ask me whether this is because suicide was considered a noble way of dealing with shame. No, it’s not. You’re
thinking of medieval Japan.
    Among the people I knew, academic pressure was the main reason for suicidal thoughts. When I was in school, the odds of university entrance  were slim. In fact, you could only apply to one
major university at a time, per year. If you failed the exam, you could take it the following year. But if you were a boy, you could only sit for the exam for up to three consecutive years before
you had to enlist in the army. (If you were admitted to a university successfully, you could defer conscription until after you got your degree.)
    By the time a man was done with his approximately two-year army stint, there was no way that he could have retained enough information ever to sit for the exam again. His life was finished.
    According to Lee Dong-ho, as of 2008, Korea has been trying to implement a university admissions system “more similar to that of the United States, including volunteer work, hobbies, or
activities in the application to show all their skills.” But the plan has backfired: “This has the side effect of pressuring students to improve in [extracurriculars] in addition to
test scores,” says Kim Young-sun.
    It’s clearly not the teachers’ or the government’s fault. The students’ and parents’ obsession with competition borders on mental illness. In fact, according to the
NIIED staff, the studying addiction has its own name in Korea: “study fever.” Kim Young-sun sees this as a problem for Korea’s future. “We have to keep up with the demands
for creativity. When people are so focused on college, it’s a loss of human resources. Korea loses its competitive advantage.” I think it’s very telling that even in the context
of encouraging creativity, Kim still frames it in terms of Korea’s national competitive edge.
    Kim added that the ministry is also trying to de-emphasize rote memorization and the overly heavy importance placed on mathematics studies. While I would certainly not object to any education
reforms that might lower the high Korean youth suicide rate,